TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Brewers’ Jeffress, Hader having special seasons
By JERRY TAPP
Both Jeremy Jeffress and Josh Hader have had great seasons up to this point and were both All-Stars this season.
Through games of July 27, Jeffress has a 1.45 ERA in 49.2 innings pitched over 49 games. Hader has an ERA of 1.39 in 34 games and 51.2 innings pitched.
Neither will qualify for the ERA title in the league since that honor is based on 162 innings pitched for the season. But both have a chance to put their names on the list of Brewers pitchers who have compiled some of the lowest ERAs in a season.
If we base the lowest ERAs for the Brewers in a season on pitching 50 or more innings, Hader already has the second-lowest ERA in team history (of course, the season is not over). Here are the Brewers pitchers with the lowest ERA in a season with a minimum of 50 innings pitched. (Hader is not listed because the 2018 season is not over.)
Lowest ERA in a season (min 50 innings pitched)
1.04-Rollie Fingers, 1981 (78 innings pitched)
1.65-C.C. Sabathia, 2008 (130.2 innings pitched)
1.65-Paul Mirabella, 1988 (60 innings pitched)
1.66-Jerry Bell, 1972 (70.2 innings pitched)
1.74-Derrick Turnbow, 2005 (67.1 innings pitched)
If we change the criteria to games pitched instead of innings pitched, both Jeffress and Hader have a chance to climb near the top of this category. Here are the Brewers pitchers with the lowest ERA in a season with a minimum of 50 games pitched. (Jeffress and Hader are again not listed on because the season is not over.)
Lowest ERA in a season (min 50 games pitched)
1.74-Derrick Turnbow, 2005 (69 games pitched)
1.78-Corey Knebel, 2017 (76 games pitched)
1.89-Chad Fox, 2001 (65 games pitched)
1.90-Tom Murphy, 1974 (70 games pitched)
1.91-Ken Sanders, 1971 (83 games pitched)
For the record, the Brewers single-season record for lowest ERA in a season (minimum off 162 innings pitched) is held by Mike Caldwell — he had a 2.36 ERA for the Brewers in 1978. The second-best ERA is Teddy Higuera’s 2.45 ERA in 1988.
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.